I see that on the eve of the House passing what will surely be a vetoed Iraq spending bill, some in the military are getting a little disgusted:
Senior military commanders here now portray the intransigence of Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government as the key threat facing the U.S. effort in Iraq, rather than al-Qaeda terrorists, Sunni insurgents or Iranian-backed militias.
In more than a dozen interviews, U.S. military officials expressed growing concern over the Iraqi government’s failure to capitalize on sharp declines in attacks against U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians. A window of opportunity has opened for the government to reach out to its former foes, said Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of day-to-day U.S. military operations in Iraq, but “it’s unclear how long that window is going to be open.”
Apparently the Iraq government is not taking advantage of the paradise we have created, what with 2007 on track to be the most violent year yet (but hey- the monthly violence is down to where it was last year!), and a number of officers go on record in the WaPo piece showing a little disdain and disgust.
Granted, I have not checked with the Confederate Yankee, so I am just assuming they were actual military officers. I will check with him later after he gets his Beauchamp on and investigates them all to make sure I am up to date on my smears. Hopefully some of them have MySpace accounts.
rachel
Start getting them out. Now.
Notorious P.A.T.
How dare Iraq’s politicians be as incompetent as ours! That takes a lot of nerve!
RSA
How can they do this to us? They’ve had a flat tax for four years now!
teak111
And we are going to do exactly what now that Miliki is digging in his heels on a Shite dominated gov? What’s that you say, yellow cake, are you sure? WMD, and we have photographic proof. Mushroom cloud, dear me. Hell, take him out. We’ll be welcomed with roses and candy by the good old Iraqi people. Take a coupla months at the very most.
KCinDC
Oh, that’s not new. For ages Republicans and Democrats alike have been blaming the Iraqis for not taking advantage of the wonderful opportunity we’ve offered them and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. I particularly remember feeling disgusted when Sen. Levin started using that argument for getting out. Maybe it’s the only way we’ll actually get out, because the American people need some Other to blame, but it’s still revolting.
Xanthippas
The right wants to claim that the “surge” has done its job, though of course we have gotten lucky to a great extent as well. Unfortunately, the purpose of the surge, the “breathing room” that its proponents touted, actually serves the opposite purpose of reconciliation; Shiite leaders now grow ever more intransigent as we bolster their hated enemies. The Sunnis grow more unified and powerful, and the Shiites grow more divided amongst themselves and fearful of the Sunni. Naturally, the result of all this is unlikely to be anything approaching reconciliation.
CMcC
You quote: ” A window of opportunity has opened for the government to reach out to its former foes, said Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of day-to-day U.S. military operations…”
In other words, why can’t the Iraqi Shiite government reach out to Sunnis just like George W. Bush has reached out to Democrats?
Oh, wait… They are. As Dick Cheney said, “Go fuck yourself.”
Jake
This is just an add-on to “Maybe those people aren’t ready for democracy [deep sorrowful sigh].”
Yes, and why is that? Could it be the only way you can gain a semblance of order in an Iraqi city is to pack it full of soldiers? That rather suggests that any “reaching out” will only last as long as the soldiers are there and the minute they go, there will be less shaking of hands and more grabbing of throats. If I didn’t know better I’d say someone is trying to cover their ass so they can declare victory, get the fuck out of there and when large chunks of B-dad are burning, drag M. Sec. Rice out of her hole to chirp: “No one could have possibly foreseen the ethnic cleansing that swept through Iraq.”
But this is a hopeful sign for getting the troops out. As soon as this Admin. comes up with a story that they feel absolves them of all guilt or responsibility for their clusterfuck, it will be time for a poo-rade!
Billy K
After exhaustively testing this scenario with my extensive GI Joe figurine collection, I’ve concluded that Democracy, Victory and a Pony Factory are just around the corner. So STFU.
les
I can’t believe these traitors are saying the surge hasn’t created political progress!!11! Why, ethnic cleansing of Baghdad neighborhoods is nearly complete, and citizens can go out of their houses safely, as long as they don’t go too far or take the wrong route. The Sunni “mafiacation” or tribafication or whatever is settling in in the North, and we’ve armed them sufficiently to brush off AQiI and feel they can defy the central government, so they’re calming down. Sure, it may take a while for the Shiites to sort out the south, but armed negotiation proceeds. Perhaps Kirkuk is not settled, but the Kurds are conducting armed negotiations with their neighbors and acting generally like a settled nation. Our embassy to the Green Zone is abuilding, and a sufficient supply of armor for our state dept. volunteers and the Iraqi government officials is assured. Finally, the 4 million refugees and internally displaced probably never voted anyway, and who needed all those doctors, teachers, etc? They’re pacified, right? George’s surge, by the standards of his war, is a raging success.
The Other Steve
I’m ok with blaming Iraqis, if it gets the US out of Iraq.
OxyCon
It seems to me that the only success to come out of the “surge” isn’t a military one, but instead is the uneasy alliance reached with former Sunni insurgents who were no doubt the best trained militants in Iraq, having been members of Saddam’s Republican Guard.
That means, to me, that there is still the huge problem of the pro-Iranian Shiite militants who make up the majority of Iraq. We all know how Saddam dealt with these people, mass graves and all that.
D-Chance.
So our “way out” will be to claim that they just aren’t ready for a democracy-style government, eh?
Didn’t the anti-war folk say the same thing… oh… about FIVE FREAKING YEARS AGO before we ever went in there???
/sigh
The Other Andrew
Is anyone taking bets on how long until we use the military to take down the Iraqi government and start over from the ground up (again)? Our interests are obviously very different from theirs, and at some point, that’s going to be expressed via their government, no matter how dysfunctional it is. They’ll do something that we don’t agree with (or something that hurts our interests), or they’ll try to vote us off the proverbial island.
And then we’ll finally emerge from the nation-building rationale for war and either enter Democracy 2.0: This Time, It’ll Work For Reals! or come up with some new rationale.
Delia
B…b..b.but they’ve still got all that lovely oil in the ground, and haven’t gotten around to approving that oil law that will give it away to American oil companies. I’m sure that some Iraqi government or other will see the light and approve that one any day now. And we’ve got all those nice superbases we’ve finished building for Our Troops so we can let the poor, benighted Iraqis know that we really are The Good Guys.
We can’t leave now. Oh goodness me, no. We got to come up with some excuse or another.
Barry
The Other Andrew, a while back (before the surge), some reporters were writing that their government contacts were hinting about a change in US alliances. The idea was that (duh!) the invasion of Iraq had strengthened the relative positions of Shiites in the middle east, and that it was time to shift to a pro-Sunni position.
That’s what seems to have happened, and as others have said above, I’m just wondering when Bush and Cheney will decide to openly break with the government of Iraq.
Tony J
Well, no they didn’t.
Cast your mind back a little and you’ll recall that for the last five years it’s been the pro-war wingnuts who, after Shia protests forced the White House to end Bremner’s pro-consulship and call elections, occasionally deploy the strawman argument that, since the whole clusterfuck was all about ‘bringing democracy to Iraq’ – which it wasn’t, but they say it anyway – then any opposition to continuing the occupation = opposition to ‘bringing democracy to Iraq’, with the added proviso that you can only oppose ‘bringing democracy to Iraq’ if you don’t think smelly brown people are advanced enough to handle life without a God-King to tell them what to do.
With the punchline being, that since that’s a traditional wingnut way of voicing their racism, and not a quality that lefty liberals share, it would be hypocritical in the extreme for lefty liberals to make that argument.
Ergo: Anyone who opposes the war is a racist and a hypocrite.
Don’t go promoting those wingnut memes, sport. They make you look daft.
montysano
KCinDC, up top, nailed it: watching Carl Levin (and Hillary, and others) do their “We’re losing patience with the Iraqis” schtick was almost too much to bear. All that was missing was for Carl to cross his arms and angrily tap his foot.
So…….. we thought we could waltz into Iraq and defuse the centuries-old hatred between Shia and Sunni by simply telling them to get over themselves? And this didn’t work out? Imagine…
searp
I was on 4 FOBS this year, for two months, helping soldiers.
The essential fact about “Iraq”:
It is destroyed.
Saddam started the process and we finished it.
That is right, it is no more. There are many who benefit from pretending, but the reality is that Iraq is no more.
Once that fact is grasped, the smoke rises and things are plain. The violence levels, the Iraqi political developments, the amount of electricity, none of it means much. The plain truth is that we cannot put it back together any more than we could resurrect the Byzantine Empire.
For those that see meaning in the developments during the latest Friedman Unit: get the smoke out of your eyes.
For those that opine on Middle East policy: I will never take you seriously until you talk about energy independence in the same speech.
Enlightened Layperson
I’m with Barry. I’ve been wondering for some time if we are quietly switching sides in the Iraqi war.